The present invention relates to a protective housing.
A known protective housing consists of a lower section, with cable inlets set into recesses in the separation face between the lower section and the upper section. The upper section is sealed relative to the lower section and the cable inlets are sealed against water and air under pressure.
Such a protective housing may especially be in the form of a spigot and socket housing for the jointing and/or branching of telecommunications cables. With said housings the seal between the lower and upper sections is formed by means of a self-adhesive strip of bitumen or a bitumen sealing compound which is also wrapped around each cable to be fed into the housing and is then compressed within the separation face and the recessed cable inlets as the upper and lower sections are screwed together. To increase the effectiveness of the seal, the separation faces between the lower and the upper sections and the recesses for the cable inlets are also normally produced in the form of narrow parallel ridges so that the sealing strip or sealing compound is made to squeeze between the ridges.
Protective housings and/or spigot and socket connectors of this type are used for a wide variety of applications, including for example present state of the art uses in telecommunications, where they are used not only to protect the connections and/or branches of copper cables etc., but also for the jointing and branching of glass fibre cables.
In all applications, and especially where such housings and spigot and socket connectors are used in existing telecommunications networks, it is unavoidable that the housings need to be opened up and reclosed repeatedly, e.g. to carry out new cable connections or changes to the network. This opening and closing of known protective housings is very time consuming and always requires thorough cleaning operations in the region of the housing separation face and the cable inlets, since the bonded and compressed seals at these points need to be removed completely to ensure the desired gas pressure and water pressure tight seal when the housing is closed again.
An objective of the present invention is to improve protective housings of the above type in such a way that they can be reopened and reclosed without difficulty without in the process adversely affecting the specified protective classification of the housing.